every night the gardener waits for me to fall asleep

but they don’t know i’m pretending. they don’t know

i’ve seen them replace the pages in the books.

they don’t know i’ve heard them on the phone

giving their hushed report about my decline.

some breaths are so strained i think my chest

will snap. they’re waiting for me to explode again.

every night they say it’s never taken them this long before

& every night i hold the flame behind my teeth.

there’s an apocalypse in all of us. there’s an apocalypse

in all of us. there’s an apocalypse in all of us.

Apocalypse #417

here we are again: i dance, i cry, the planet explodes.

i used to think my body was a broken machine.

the gardener told me over & over my bones weren’t

permanent, though I grew attached to them all the same.

what is love if not an apocalypse? took my ponderings

to the trees & only got more questions. not sure

what my final form will be, though i’m certain now

this isn’t it: vascillitating between ice & recklessness.

i am terrified of my own wonder. i run toward blaze,

toward him, toward them, toward anything that keeps

this self from splintering further. the thing i don’t tell

hardly anyone is that i stopped being one person

years ago, the four of us a constant swirl: inexorable joy,

relentless melancholy, immutable chaos, & the gardener

returned. it was always going to end this way: the world

beginning & beginning & beginning, the clang clang clang

as the horses near, my emotions corporeal, unboxed.

this body couldn’t hold us all. i had to build some more.